ABSTRACT

We can no longer conceive a world without the computer. At the end of the century, the millennium problem was not a psychological fin-de-siècle feeling, but a practical one: how to program the computer to enable it to compute data beyond 1999. The millennium problem shows that the importance of the computer has reached far beyond the comprehension of the long line of its inventors, beginning with the sixteen-year-old French Blaise Pascal inventing a calculating machine for his father in the seventeenth century. Now, all over the world, we are being ‘processed’ by computers and daily life has become truly digitalized. Still, there are many areas where the computer is not used and could represent a powerful instrument, as it could in play therapy (Delfos, 1992). Play therapists, however, do not belong to the generation that grew up with the computer, and they often see it at best as a useful instrument for writing up reports on play therapy. That is one of the reasons why there is seldom a computer to be found in the play therapy room. There has been some experimental work on systematic use of the computer in social work with children (The Bridge, 1996). But there is still much resistance. Matsuda (1999) views opponents to small children playing on computers as ‘emotional opponents’ who are opposed because of their own preconceptions. Many of them have never touched a computer.